This article may need to be rewritten to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards.(May 2010) |
![]() First edition | |
Author | Saul Bellow |
---|---|
Cover artist | Mel Williamson [1] |
Language | English |
Publisher | Viking Press |
Publication date | September 21, 1964 [2] |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | |
Pages | 341 |
ISBN | 978-0142437292 |
813.54 |
Herzog is a 1964 novel by Saul Bellow, composed in part of letters from the protagonist Moses E. Herzog. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction [3] and the Prix International. In 2005, Time magazine named it one of the 100 best novels in the English language since Time's founding in 1923. [4] [5]
The novel follows five days in the life of Moses E. Herzog, whom at the age of forty-seven, is having a midlife crisis following his second divorce with his previous wife. He has two estranged children, one by each wife, and is in a relationship with a vibrant woman, Ramona, but finds himself running away from the commitment getting cold feet.
Herzog spends much of his time mentally writing letters he never sends. These letters are aimed at friends, family members, and famous figures, including recipients who are dead or who Herzog never knew. The one common thread is that Herzog is always expressing disappointment, either his own in the failings of others or their words, or apologizing for the way he has disappointed others.
Herzog's second wife, Madeleine, has recently left him for Valentine Gersbach, whom Herzog considered a close friend. While still married, Madeleine convinced Herzog to move her and their daughter Junie to Chicago and to arrange for Gersbach and his wife, Phoebe, to move as well. The plans were a ruse, and shortly after arriving in Chicago, Madeleine throws Herzog out and attempts to have him committed to an asylum.
The novel opens with Herzog in his house in Ludeyville, a fictional town in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. He is contemplating returning to New York to see Ramona, but instead flees to Martha's Vineyard to visit some friends. He arrives at their house, but writes an actual note saying that he has to leave.
Herzog then heads to New York, and, after spending a night with Ramona, he heads to the courthouse to discuss with his lawyer the possibility of regaining custody of his daughter, Junie. He subsequently witnesses a series of court hearings, including one where a woman is charged with beating her three-year-old to death by flinging him against a wall. Moses, already distraught after receiving a letter from Junie's babysitter about an incident in which Valentine locked Junie in the car while he and Madeleine argued inside the house, heads to Chicago. He goes to his stepmother's house and picks up an antique pistol with two bullets in it, forming a vague plan to kill Madeleine and Valentine and run off with Junie.
The plan goes awry when Herzog sees Valentine giving Junie a bath and realizes that she is in no danger. The next day, after taking his daughter to the aquarium, Herzog crashes his car and is charged with possession of a loaded weapon. His brother, the rational Will, picks him up to try and help get him back on his feet. Herzog heads to Ludeyville, where his brother meets him and tries to convince him to check himself into an institution, which Herzog has considered but ultimately decides against. To Will's surprise, Ramona joins them for dinner, and Herzog begins making plans to fix up the house, which, like his life, needs repair but is still structurally sound. Herzog closes by saying that he does not need to write any more letters.
In flashbacks throughout the novel, other critical details of Herzog's life come to light, including his first marriage to Daisy, their son, Marco, the life of Herzog's father, and Herzog's sexual molestation by a stranger on a street in Chicago.
![]() | This section's tone or style may not reflect the encyclopedic tone used on Wikipedia.(March 2014) |
"People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas", Bellow once wrote. "We live among ideas much more than we live in nature." [6] Herzog is such a person. In fact, he considers his addiction to ideas to be his greatest virtue. Herzog's ideas, as expressed in his letters, are brilliant and seductive; "After Herzog", the New York Times book reviewer exulted, "no writer need pretend in his fiction that his education stopped in the eighth grade." [7] But, said Bellow in an interview, Herzog "comes to realize at last that what he considers his intellectual 'privilege' has proved to be another form of bondage." [8] It is only when he has loosened this bondage and gotten in touch with the "primordial person" who exists outside this ideology that Herzog can "achieve the experience of authentic being." [9]
The story is told entirely from Herzog's point of view, alternating between first-person and third person. [7] Of the hero's pervasive consciousness, Irving Howe wrote: "We are made captive in the world of Herzog ... the consciousness of the character forms the enclosing medium of the novel." [10] In typical Bellow style, the descriptions of characters' emotions and physical features are rich in wit and energy. Herzog's relationships are the central theme of the novel, not just with women and friends, but also society and himself. Herzog's own thoughts and thought processes are laid bare in the letters he writes. [11]
As the novel progresses, the letters become fewer and fewer. This seems to mirror the healing of the narrator's mind, as his attention turns from his inner struggles and the intellectual ideas that fascinate him towards the real world outside and the real options offered by his current situation – not having to be a scholar, the possibility of starting afresh with Ramona, and so on.
In many ways, the character of Herzog echoes that of a fictionalized Saul Bellow. Both Herzog and Bellow grew up in Canada, the sons of bootleggers who had emigrated from Russia (St. Petersburg). Both are Jewish, lived in Chicago for significant periods of time, and were divorced twice (ultimately, Bellow would marry five times, divorcing four of his wives). Herzog is nearly the same age that Bellow was when he wrote the novel. The character of Valentine Gersbach is based on Jack Ludwig, a long-time friend of Bellow who had an affair with Bellow's second wife, Sondra. [12] Similarly, Ramona is based on Rosette Lamont, a professor of French whom Bellow dated after divorcing his second wife, Sasha Tschacbasov. [13] Both Lamont and Ludwig reviewed Herzog without mentioning the autobiographical elements, with the latter favorably describing it as "a major breakthrough." [14]
Asked about these similarities, Bellow said, "I don't know that that sort of thing is really relevant. I mean, it's a curiosity about reality, which is impure; let's put it that way. Let's both be bigger than that." [15]
Saul Bellow was an American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Chicago.
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer.
The Black Dahlia (1987) is a crime fiction novel by American author James Ellroy. Its subject is the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California, which received wide attention because her corpse was horrifically mutilated and discarded in an empty residential lot. The investigation ultimately led to a broad police corruption scandal. While rooted in the facts of the Short murder and featuring many real-life people, places and events, Ellroy's novel blends facts and fiction, most notably in providing a solution to the crime when in reality it has never been solved. James Ellroy dedicated The Black Dahlia, "To Geneva Hilliker Ellroy 1915-1958 Mother: Twenty-nine Years Later, This Valediction in Blood." The epigraph for The Black Dahlia is "Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator, My first lost keeper, to love and look at later. -Anne Sexton."
Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel, the only one published during his lifetime. It was published by Random House in 1952, and addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
Mark Harris was an American novelist, literary biographer, and educator, remembered for his baseball novels featuring Henry Wiggen, particularly Bang the Drum Slowly. Harris's obituary in The Denver Post calls him "one of that legion of under-the-radar writers who for decades consistently turned out excellent novels and went largely unsung as he did...Harris said of his books that 'they are about the one man against his society and trying to come to terms with his society, and trying to succeed within it without losing his own identity or integrity.' He might have said the same thing of himself."
Henderson the Rain King is a 1959 novel by Saul Bellow. The book's blend of philosophical discourse and comic adventure has helped make it one of his more popular works.
Ravelstein is Saul Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it received widespread critical acclaim. It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written in the form of a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, a renowned professor, and Nikki, his lover. Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies. After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce. Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write the memoir.
Humboldt's Gift is a 1975 novel by Canadian-American author Saul Bellow. It won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and contributed to Bellow's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year.
Pascal Avram "Pat" Covici was a Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor, best known for his close associations with authors such as John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and many more noted American literary figures, mainly through his position at Viking Press.
The Adventures of Augie March is a picaresque novel by Saul Bellow, published in 1953 by Viking Press. It features the eponymous Augie March, who grows up during the Great Depression, and it is an example of Bildungsroman, tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations and relationships from boyhood to manhood.
Thomas Francis McGuane III is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Cutting Horse Association Members Hall of Fame and the Fly Fishing Hall of Fame. McGuane's papers, manuscripts, and correspondence are located in the Montana State University Archives and Special Collections and are available for research use. In 2023, he was given the first Award for Excellence in Service to the MSU Library for the advancement of scholarship and access to unique materials.
Mr. Sammler's Planet is a 1970 novel by the American author Saul Bellow. It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1971.
Isaac Rosenfeld was an American writer who became a prominent member of New York intellectual circles. Rosenfeld wrote one novel, which, according to literary critic Marck Shechner, "helped fashion a uniquely American voice by marrying the incisiveness of Mark Twain to the Russian melancholy of Dostoevsky," and many articles for The Nation, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Some of those articles were posthumously published in a volume titled An Age of Enormity, and his short stories were later published as Alpha and Omega.
Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.
Chicago literature is writing, primarily by writers born or living in Chicago, that reflects the culture of the city.
Jack Barry Ludwig was a Canadian-born American-resident novelist, short story writer, and sportswriter.
John Jacob Clayton is an American fiction writer, teacher, and editor. He has published four novels including Mitzvah Man, and Kuperman's Fire, as well as five collections of short fiction including Minyan: Ten Interwoven Stories and Many Seconds into the Future. He was editor for the Heath Introduction to Fiction, a college anthology published in six editions from 1977 to 1999. In 2020 he published the non-fiction memoir Parkinson's Blues: Stories of My Life.
Inside Story is an autobiographical novel by the English author Martin Amis, published in 2020. It was Amis' final novel to be published before his death in 2023.
Nahum Tschacbasov also known as Nahum Lichter, and NahumTschakbassoff, was a Russian-born American painter, printmaker, graphic artist, poet, businessperson, and educator. He used many names including Nahum Lichter, Nathan Richter, H. H. Richter, Hanathan Richter, and Nathan Lichterman. Tschacbasov was a member of "The Ten", a group of expressionist artists.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)